Isabella Wore a Toque
by namewithheld
Summary: This is a little interludesequel following 'Cathy and Heathcliffe'. Read that one first, or this will leave you dazed and confused R


Title: Isabella Wore a Toque

Author: Tote

Genre: angst

Rating: PG but it's not for the faint of heart, or the wary of literature: some of this requires having read Wuthering Heights, or at least having a basic idea of the story.

A/N: After receiving a review from LadyJenny, I felt the need to write a bit of an interlude following the events in my other story: Cathy and Heathcliffe. It's the quickest I've ever updated a story and it might seem a little messy, or weird. It might annoy you and you might disagree with the direction it's gone in. Only one way to tell me, though: REVIEW!

Joan was never a person to let misery and misfortune just wash over her. She always fought—tooth and nail. Her stubborn, moody determination was part of what made her who she was. But she didn't feel much like fighting when Friday morning came, like all school mornings, too soon.

The rising sun found her sitting bathing in its early morning glow, out on the porch with a book in her hands. She was up before her parents had even rolled out of bed. That was a first.

The book in her hands was _Wuthering Heights_, her mother's weather-beaten paperback copy But Joan hadn't been reading the story itself; she'd been reading the introduction. In it, the cocky aspiring writer/professor of English literature at NYU, coolly stated that many readers found that the second half of the book revealed a darker, more sinister side to Heathcliffe that made his character all the more tragic and ultimately—much more pathetic.

"_Heathcliffe makes it his life's ambition to seek revenge for all those who wronged him in the past but it is this very ambition, this obsession with evening the score, that eventually leads to his ruin, both morally and mentally."_

Joan cast the book aside and leaned her chin upon the knees drawn up to her chest. She hugged herself, ignoring the quiet racing of her heart. God had subtly hinted that Adam alone was not at fault for what happened. He'd told her to read the book and ask herself whose character it was that identified with most strongly.

And now, the book told her that Heathcliffe's vengefulness and inability to forgive led to his downfall. Was He telling her she was setting herself up for gloom and doom unless she congratulated Adam on his new Jane? Released him from what they had? Joan wasn't sure she could.

But hadn't she done that already?

She remembered the dead look in Adam's face yesterday, the way his hands lay flat and open like a corpse's. The light in his once-shining, once heartbreakingly beautiful eyes seemed to die out completely, blown out like the last candle on a birthday cake.

_And I'm not Jane anymore._

Wasn't she? Who was this girl, Jane? Had she invented her?

Sighing to herself, she traced the denim of her jeans (she was wearing them beneath her little white nightie) listening to the crickets in the grass, the pedaling newspaper boys go by on their bikes, the suburbs waking up.

These sounds depressed her; agitated her and she couldn't think why. These soft every-day sounds were the kinds of silly things she used to take comfort in: the safe sameness of the days.

Now she longed for a change, something radical and dramatic. How could she sit back and see the same people saying the same things, making the same mistakes, over and over when she, somehow and in just one night, had altered forever?

She'd been sitting alone with nothing but her thoughts and the book for hours. Cathy and Heathcliffe fought, betrayed each other, married other people. Joan had read and cried, unsure who for. Cathy starved herself to death, became a ghost of who she once was, until Heathcliffe appeared. Joan held her breath.

She'd begged him for mercy, for understanding, to stay with her while she was so obviously dying and Heathcliffe had relented in anguish, even as her husband Linton was coming to the door—_hush, my darling. Hush, hush, Catherine! I'll stay. If he shot me so, I'd dye with a blessing upon my lips. _But it was Cathy who died, not long after, in childbirth.

Heathcliffe didn't die till the very end, after he'd gone crazy, haunted by Cathy's ghost. Nelly found him one morning, dead in his bed by an open window and soaked by the rain. Joan herself had felt as though she had died as she read this, or as if some part of her died: the part that was still haunted by the ghost of what was; what could've been.

The part of her that despised Bonnie and M.J. and Iris and blamed. It didn't matter, she realized now, who was between them. It was she and Adam that had slid away from each other, surreptitiously and quietly, till they didn't feel like Jane and Adam, till Adam slept with someone else.

All these weeks, she'd been blaming him for all of it—he'd torn them apart. But hadn't they been apart already? Since before the camper, before the concert—her secrets had hidden her from him and he had known it, too. God, in some strange way, was as much a presence there in the mess that was her and Adam, as Bonnie was.

It frightened Joan. It made her wonder if God was right in the library. Maybe it hadn't been Adam's lack of faith in her that had made him turn to Bonnie, maybe it was her lack of faith in Adam. That distrust she'd felt, ever since the hospital—_I believe that you believe it. _It had kept her from telling him the truth, even after he made the list, read those books.

But she couldn't pretend that it hadn't been Adam, not God or Satan or the planets aligning against them, and Adam alone who went to someone else. Who slept with Bonnie.

"Hey."

Joan looked up, expecting God with his metaphors or Adam with his excuses, or lack of them.

But it was M.J. She was wearing an extremely cool army-green mini and a t-shirt with a denim jacket over it. She was wearing a new toque: a pink one that severely clashed with her skirt, proclaiming in loud, capitalized letters: THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. God, where did she find these political message toques? On E-bay?

And more importantly, what the hell was she doing in Joan's front yard?

"Hi," Joan returned reluctantly, not hiding her displeasure at the sight of beautiful, political M.J. "It's kind of early, isn't it?"

"Yeah, sorry," M.J. agreed with a lop-sided smile. "I just had this hunch you'd be awake. Plus, I have a paper route around here."

Joan raised her eyebrows in slight amazement, now catching sight of a mountain bike behind her. "A newspaper route? Really? Isn't that…"

"…really lame?" M.J. finished, sitting down beside her on the porch with her pretty, self-depreciating smile. "Yeah, totally. But my Dad hasn't given me allowance since I was like twelve, so…I need the money."

To fund her toque-collecting habit, Joan assumed.

M.J. looked down, crossing and uncrossing her legs nervously, drumming her fingers against the wooden surface of the porch. "I felt like I should talk to you about something."

Joan thought she had a lot of guts to just show up like this—it was like she didn't get how stalkeresque and weird this was.

I mean, it's not like they were _friends _or anything. Quite the opposite, as far as Joan was concerned. Yes, she'd acknowledged to herself that M.J. and Bonnie weren't the real or main problem between her and Adam but that didn't mean she suddenly liked her or anything.

"Look, M.J.," she started to say, ready to tell her to go fuck herself six ways from Sunday and then she caught sight of Cute Boy God, casually standing with His hands in his pockets across the street.

Even from this distance, she could see Him gaze sternly at her.

She remembered what He'd said about labeling characters too soon, how it kept you from seeing the real person beneath. Sighing, she half-turned, to face M.J. more fully. "Fire away. What did you think you had to talk to me about at five thirty in the morning, M.J.?"

Well, a little sarcasm was only natural: this was the girl that touched Adam's shoulder, that asked him to call her Mary _Jane._

"Well, I found Adam in the library yesterday." She cleared her throat quietly, playing with the fringe of her green skirt. "He was like, in shock or something. He just sat there, barely looking at me. I asked him if he was okay and he didn't answer."

Joan scowled at Cute Boy God across the street, as if to say, _what the hell is this? More cosmic boot camp?_

God merely leaned against a big beautiful oak, watching them.

"So I got up and I was about to leave when he goes," M.J. paused, looking at Joan thoughtfully, "and I'll never forget this, he goes: 'I lost Jane'."

Joan closed her eyes against the warm sunlight streaming over her face, getting into her eyes—she felt a tear slip down along her cheek and absently, she added in thought: _so did I._

"And I was like: Jane? Who the hell is that?" M.J. continued: "And then I remembered him calling you that in the hallway, after English.

And I remembered the way you looked at the drawing he made, how you looked at him when you were reading to us in class…" M.J. trailed off, as if to say: etc, etc. "I said to him: 'from what I can tell, she loves you a lot.'

He put away the book he was reading when I came in and he said…" M.J. frowned, obviously straining her memory for his exact words: "I think he said:

'You don't get it. She's gone. I did it.'

We were by the lockers and he just started…" Her eyes widened, as if afraid, just to be telling the story: "…pounding his head against this wall of lockers, over and over again, really _hard_ and I was freaking out! I think I screamed, because Mr. Price came out of nowhere, and sort of pulled him away and Adam like, _threw_ Price off him and—there was blood. On the lockers and on his forehead. It was awful."

Joan had opened her eyes wide and her mouth stood, trembling, open as she stared at M.J. and listened, not daring to interrupt, tears running unheeded down her cheeks as she listened. Now she spoke, breathless, her voice riding on a sob: "Blood? Did they take him to a hospital? Is he okay?"

M.J. bit her lip.

Joan, losing her patience completely as her last nerve broke, grabbed the other girl's shoulders and shook her hard, her voice rising in emotion: "Answer me! Now!"

M.J. shook her head helplessly, saying: "He ran out. I don't know what happened to him after that, but I'm worried, Joan, he looked so crazy, I thought he might…"

"No!" Joan interjected vehemently, rising to her feet in one fast, fluid motion, "No! No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't do that to me, he said he wouldn't—" Oh, God, but that was before. Before she'd told him she wasn't Jane, before God had made her connect him to Cathy, Cathy who died in torment.

"Here," M.J. said suddenly, and gave Joan a key, the key to her bike. She indicated the shiny new blue mountain bike with her hand, saying: "Take it. Go to his house."

Joan nodded, running to the bike, unlocking it and jumping on the saddle, her eyes drawn to God across the street as he did so and his grim gaze. M.J., who had run after her and watched her get on, followed her gaze and said: "He's the one that told me how to get to your house."

But Joan didn't reply: she just started pedaling, faster and faster, till she was no more than a dot fading into the distance.

Mary Jane watched her, biting her lip and feeling bad she hadn't run after Adam in the first place. She'd been too shocked, too weirded out by his crazy behavior. She played with the silver cross that hung from a chain around her neck; it was nervous habit she had.

"You okay?"

M.J. looked up, startled. The handsome boy who'd given her the directions to Joan's house had appeared suddenly beside her, looking concerned. She smiled at him gratefully, replying: "Yeah. Just worried about your friend, Joan's boyfriend, Adam."

"Just worried?" His tone was somehow challenging, it made her feel defensive.

"Yeah, just worried. He's madly in love with _her_, okay?" She sighed, holding the cross tightly between her thumb and index finger. "I don't stand a chance."

The guy nodded in agreement, glancing off into the direction Joan had gone. "No, probably not. But even if you did—" he looked at her, frowning. "Would you want to be with someone who didn't love you?"

M.J. looked at him, taking the question seriously. She was tired and stressed out and felt a little guilty—she was too distracted to think it was weird for some random guy to get all philosophical with her. "I don't know…maybe. Probably. If I loved him enough."

The handsome boy nodded to the book, Joan's book, which she held in her hand. "You finish it yet?"

"No. I'm new though, Mrs. Brown is going to let me write an essay about one of the characters, instead of a test. You're in my English class?" She frowned, trying to place him.

"I'd go for Isabella, if I were you," the boy replied, ignoring her last question. He turned and started walking away, and over his shoulder he called: "Might help you understand some things."

"What?" M.J. called back, thoroughly confused. "What are you talking about?"

But the good-looking, mysterious boy only raised his hand in backwards wave. He turned a corner, disappearing from her sight. She would never see him again. But she would remember him for a long time.


End file.
